Perhaps some organization can be added to this discussion to help me understand how this document might have originally been created. I suspect this post is primarily for my own edification. Here would be the sequence of events? (please edit and correct as you see fit)
1. Raw form is created by printing company with all the official printing.
2. DOH ID number added. Not sure at this point if the DOH file number would be added before the form is filled out but I suspect this might be the case. It may be very possible that the already-numbered forms are distributed to different department/localities.
3. Birth data is received from respective medical centers in the area and typewritten onto the forms. I suppose it is also possible that medical centers could be given these forms and they could be typed on-site.
4. The form is signed by the parent and dated. There is a question here as to whether the mother was still in the medical center at this time when the form is signed. Three days have elapsed since the birth but it was much more common in the 60’s for women to be held multiple days after birth. It may also be possible that SAD had to go to the DOH to sign?
5. The form is signed and dated by the “Attendant”. This happened a day after Stanley signed and the same day that the form was stamped/signed by the registrar. Would the attendant leave the medical center to sign this document? This is where the sequence and flow of the document gets a bit uncertain in my mind.
The point of this exercise is to determine if the sequence of events is normal or perhaps as was identified on the Daily Pen, the document took an unusual path from what most hospital births would have experienced.
Comments? Opinions?
Based on what Janice Okubo has said, there were pre-printed forms that had only the 151 (apparently the code for birth records) printed on them. Those were at the hospitals and at the local registrar’s office. When a child was born at a hospital the BC was filled out at the hospital and the hospital submitted it to the local registrar. If it was an unattended birth the parents could report the birth, with a doctor examining the baby within the first month and completing the BC. Or, if the parents couldn’t/wouldn’t report it, anybody could report the birth to the local registrar and he/she would try to get the needed informaton and documentation.
For Kapiolani the pattern seems to be that they submitted their BC’s to the local registrar on Fridays.
Both Okubo, the probable HDOH Administrative Rules at the time, and the CDC’s 1961 Natality Report agree that the local registrars collected BC’s over a period of time (the rules say a week) and then submitted them to the state DOH office, where they were assigned a state number. The current HDOH Administrative Rules say that the assignment of a number is how the state’s acceptance of the BC is represented.
Okubo says that the “date filed” on COLB’s that are printed out means the day that the BC was received at a HDOH office, which was almost always the same day as it was given a state number, since most births were on Oahu. For other islands, the BC’s were to be collected for a month and then sent by air mail to the state registrar’s office on the 4th of the month. Because there was mailing time involved the date that the local registrar on the island filed the BC and the date that the BC was given a state number at the state registrar’s office were different.
So what Okubo was saying was that the Oahu local registrars collected BC’s for a week and then processed them and sent them on the same day to the state registrar’s office where it was filed and given a number on the same day.
The HDoH prints its own seal, borders, and any lines. In other words, they start with a blank sheet of green security paper. Everything you see printed was laser printed by a software application programmed by the IT department at the HDoH.